All entries for Tuesday 27 June 2006

How to defeat the Great (Fire)Wall of China…

Writing about web page http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/ignoring_the_gr.html

A group of intrepid H4X0rz have discovered how to easily bypass the Chinese governments censorship of words like “democracy”. It seems that the routers are scanning all the data which attempts to pass if a censored word is in those packets, rather than stopping the data which would take a crazy amount of time and power to do on the fly, they simply send TCP reset packets to the computers concerned telling them to close the connection. This has the effect of confusing the computers concerned into obeying (because they believe that they are genuine requests).

Importantly the original data is left completely fine and passes through without a problem. Simply setting by setting up some firewall rules. As usual governments are finding out that they can think that they are smarter than anyone in the world; but the net belongs to the “l33t–est”, and here, that's not the government.

As a side note, if you are considering travelling to China and still wish to be able to freely access information on democracy, remember: use this, get a proxy (set your IP address to the ol' chestnut 127.0.0.1) and change your MAC address, ideally every time you go on the computer.

I'll close with a comment which was posted on the web site which is linked to above…
“Instead try to realize the truth."
"What truth?"
"There is no wall.

: 27 Jun 2006 22:09 |  Tags: China Internet |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem